The Australians are getting closer to the black box of flight 370

TONY Abbott says rescue teams have homed in on signals they are now certain belong to the black box flight recorder from missing Malaysian flight MH370.

The Prime Minister, who is in Shanghai, spoke after an aviation expert claimed the breakthrough discovery had been made.

Mr Abbott said they were now engaged in a race against time to find the black box as the signal starts to fade.

He will meet personally tonight with Chinese President Xi Jinping to update him on the latest efforts to find the black box, hinting it would soon be located.

“We have very much narrowed down the search area...we have now had a series of detections, some for quite a long period of time.

“It’s now getting to the stage that the signal from what we are very confident is from the black box is starting to fade.